


All in the Past

by Apikale



Category: Milo Murphy's Law
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Jealousy, M/M, Original Character(s), Shipper on Deck, Writing Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-14
Updated: 2017-08-14
Packaged: 2018-12-15 06:14:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11800119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Apikale/pseuds/Apikale
Summary: When an old colleague requests to work with Dakota on an assignment, Cavendish can't help but feel like the third wheel.  Little does he know what she actually means to his partner.





	All in the Past

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sarcophagus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sarcophagus/gifts).



> This is based on a prompt from the lovely Sarcophagus. Actually two prompts, since neither of us could decide which one to go with, so I kinda just worked them together.  
> This got longer than was originally the deal, but I'm on a road trip and there's only so many rounds of 20 Questions you can play in the car.  
> Since it is a prompt, I didn't really try to make this fit the continuity of my other fics, but there are ways to reconcile it so that they're compatible. You're probably better off just enjoying it as its own thing, though.  
> Also, the nature of the prompt kind of forced me to come up with an OC, and I hope she's not too Mary Sue-ish, but I was surprised to find that I actually did kind of like her and I hope you do too.  
> I should warn you that the end does deal with some sensitive content--it's based on an alternate history that still intertwines with ours, and a lot of the darker stains of the past two hundred some years are referenced (particularly those pertaining to U.S. treatment of Native Americans and pretty much everything about WWII). I understand that the fallout from those atrocities still affects people living today, and there may be some elements that hit a little too close to home for some readers. If you would prefer to avoid those topics, skip pretty much everything after Agent Chesapeake says goodbye and you'll be fine.  
> I don't know if Chesapeake is her first name or her last name.  
> Finally, I got a little soap-boxy about bee populations and insecticides. I'm a beekeeper and I hate Sevin Dust, in case that's not obvious. PSA, never apply it to flowers in bloom.

It was bad enough that Mr. Block had called at four in the morning to assign a mission.

It was worse when Vinnie pretended to be in such a deep slumber (he _had_ to be faking it) that Balthazar had to answer the call.

It was even worse when the mission wasn’t even for Balthazar.

And the humiliation kept coming.  Balthazar had to drag Vinnie out of bed just so he could talk to Mr. Block, then Mr. Block declared that Vinnie was off pistachio duty for the time being, _then_ he said he’d assign Balthazar a new partner if he could “find some schmuck who was willing,” and finally he announced that Vinnie’s partner for this mission would arrive any second.

“And when she arrives, you’d better put your best foot forward, Hampshire,” Mr. Block warned.  “Agent Chesapeake requested you specifically on this assignment, for reasons unknown to god or man, and if you don’t blow it like you usually do, you might actually get paired with respectable partners more often.  So don’t blow it!”  Mr. Block hung up.

Balthazar’s blood boiled.  He had half a mind to call Mr. Block back and let it be known that he took offense at that statement, but even more aggravating was the fact that Mr. Block didn’t care in the least about having slighted him.

And then came the knock at the door, and Vinnie flung it open immediately.  “Chessie!” he called, and threw his arms around a statuesque blonde woman in a light blue halter top with a backpack slung over her left shoulder.  “Chessie, how long has it been?”

“Oh, about two hundred years,” she said with a wink, and they both giggled.  “Sorry for the intrusion, but we must act quickly, lest the Famine of 2025 come to pass.”  She held up a manila folder with the details of the mission.

“I understand,” Vinnie replied.  “Just give me five minutes to grab my stuff.  Where are we going, anyway?”

“Not sure yet.  I’ve got the coordinates, but not the name of the facility.  I figured, you’re in town, you know your way around, and it’s time we caught up.”

“Darn straight on that last one!”

_Darn straight indeed._ Never once before had Vinnie so much as mentioned an Agent Chesapeake, and here she was waltzing in as though she were family.

Balthazar had the sinking feeling that Vinnie didn’t see her as family, though.

He followed Vinnie back to the bedroom, where Vinnie was throwing everything from towels to grappling hooks into a gym bag.

“You know, I think that Milo kid had the right idea,” Vinnie mused as he added a pair of hedge trimmers to the bag.  “Be prepared for any eventuality and all that.”

“Are you sure you wish to delve into an assignment this early in the morning?” Balthazar asked him.

Vinnie shrugged.  “Me and Chesapeake go way back.  She was my partner when I stopped the Mississippi Purchase.”  He looked down, closed his eyes, and inhaled.  “I owe her one.”

Balthazar knew it wasn’t his case, that he should really just go back to bed, but for some reason instead he followed Vinnie back into the front room, where Agent Chesapeake was waiting in the swivel chair, cracking a piece of gum.

“All right, we ready to roll?” Chesapeake asked, eying Balthazar up and down.  “What about your friend there?  Is he coming?”

“You think the three of us can squeeze onto that motorcycle?” Vinnie asked.

“Oh, the bike’s busted,” Chesapeake lamented.  “Ran into some trouble in medieval Mongolia.  But hey, they gave me an upgrade.  C’mon,” she insisted, motioning for the other agents to follow, not even caring that Balthazar was still in his pajamas.  She hit the button on her remote, and the only other car in the strip mall’s parking lot beeped twice.

Balthazar’s jaw dropped open.

It was no limousine, that was certain.  This machine was far more conspicuous than the rig they had destroyed in the Pistachian incident.  It was a metallic purple Jeep, mounted on monster truck wheels, with a lime-green flame job decorating the rear doors.  Stickers representing bands Balthazar had never heard of covered the back bumper, and a slight dent above the front right tire just completed the look of sheer ruggedness.

Vinnie whistled.  “Sweet ride, Chessie!  How’d you swing that?”

Chesapeake grinned.  “Pulled a few strings.  Had to spend two months in Tennessee circa 1981, but totally worth my time.  Got to see some concerts while the artists still weren’t dead, too.”

“Nice!”

“Well hop in!” she demanded, grabbing Vinnie’s hand and darting down the stairs.  Balthazar jogged after them and scaled into the backseat while Vinnie took shotgun.

“So how exactly are we going to stop the famine?” Vinnie asked casually as Chesapeake started the car.

“By cutting it off at its source,” she replied, and then the tone of her voice shifted from carefree to topical, like a high school student before and after being asked to present an oral report.  “The lack of food wasn’t caused by severe weather or widespread disease.  It was the absence of adequate pollinators… insects, specifically.”

“Oh, that’s right!  In the 2010s honeybee populations were declining, and so thousands of new beekeepers took up the hobby to ensure their survival!” Balthazar recalled, grateful to have some sense of historical context.  “Are we… are we going to a bee yard?”

Chesapeake shook her head.  “No.  It’s true that _Apis mellifera_ populations were in jeopardy prior to the famine, as were many other pollinating insects, and that can be attributed to multiple factors.  But melittological studies have traced the 2025 famine, specifically, to the introduction of a new pesticide, which was initially formulated in this city, on this date!”

Vinnie smirked.  “So it’s a date now?”

Balthazar could have choked on his own saliva as Chesapeake hummed thoughtfully.  “I don’t know… guess we’ll just have to see how this pans out!”

She had the gall to look him in the eye via the rearview mirror.

She _knew_.

Somehow, despite knowing Balthazar for all of ten minutes, she knew what he felt for Vinnie, and felt the need to rub his face in the fact that her odds were a hundred times better.

She was cruel in a way even Block, Brick, and Savannah were not capable of.

“So our objective is to prevent the development of this pesticide,” Balthazar said in a level voice that he hoped deprived her of any satisfaction.

“Bingo.  It was marketed as Nyne Dust.  I forget the technical name.”  She glanced at her GPS, then turned right at a red light.  “So.  What kinda missions have y’all been up to?”

“Preventing the extinction of the pistachio.”  Vinnie put his feet up on the dashboard.

“Yeah?  And what else?”  Chesapeake pulled a bag of barbecue potato chips out of the glove compartment and tossed it to Vinnie.

“That’s it.  Preventing the extinction of the pistachio.  Turns out it’s a harder job than you’d think.”  He opened the bag.

“We’ve made some progress!” Balthazar stated defensively.  “Our last mission succeeded, in fact.  It’s just that then we had to go back in time and undo it.”

“Yeah, it turned into this whole mutant-pistachio-monster mess.”  Vinnie noisily crunched a fistful of the chips.

“Bummer,” Chesapeake said.  “But hey, at least you fixed it.”

“Oh definitely.  But Block doesn’t know that.  The time stream kinda healed around him so he doesn’t remember it.”

“Sometimes it’s better that way.  As we know all too well.”  She _winked_.  Was she serious?

“Too true.”  Vinnie helped himself to more chips.

By Jove, what had they gotten up to?

There was no polite way to ask.

“We’re here!” Chesapeake called out suddenly, and Balthazar shook himself.

“This is the place?” Vinnie asked incredulously.

“Of course it is,” Balthazar muttered.

Swamp City Middle School.

“Not gonna lie, I was expecting a more secure institution.  Something like the lab where they developed cold fusion, remember that?” Chesapeake commented as she parked and jumped out.  “Looks like I won’t be needing most of this stuff!”  She opened her backpack to reveal an array of top-level gadgets: a smart camouflage suit, which changed color to match its background; a tube of petrifying oil, which could paralyze attackers for up to four hours; a set of composition goggles, which would reveal the chemical makeup of any substance in their field of vision; and so on and so forth.

“Eh, keep ’em, you never know,” Vinnie told her.  “Besides, you’ve got cooler stuff than Balthy and I ever get!”

“Mr. Block sucks.  Sometimes you gotta go behind his back to get the good toys!”  She tossed the backpack onto her shoulder again and marched right up to the doors of the school.  “So, I’m guessing if it was discovered here, there must be a chem lab around somewhere.”

“Hey, do you remember which way the science room was?” Vinnie asked Balthazar as they entered the curiously unlocked front doors.  “’Cause last time we were here I was too busy running from the nutjobs!”

“And what the devil do you think _I_ was doing?”  Balthazar paused.  “But the time before that… when the temporal transporter landed us in that closet… that was in a science room, was it not?”

“You two landed in a _closet_?”  Chesapeake put a hand over her mouth, as though to stifle a giggle.

Vinnie casually ignored her mockery.  “True, but there’s probably at least three labs, one for each grade.”

“It seems like our best bet is to split up,” Chesapeake decreed.

“Excellent strategy.  I’m with Dakota!” Balthazar said a little too quickly.  He blushed when he realized that she probably meant for each person to search a different grade.

“Um… all right then.  School won’t start for another two hours, at least, so I’m guessing whoever discovers Nyne Dust isn’t here yet.  All we have to do is sabotage the labs and we’re golden.”  She pulled out three small headsets and tossed two of them to her comrades.  “Let me know if you find anything that requires backup.”

“Nice!  Finally!” Vinnie said as he clipped the earpiece into place.  “Dakota to Cavendish, over.”

“We’re standing right next to each other!”

“You’re welcome!”  Agent Chesapeake laughed as she scurried away.

Vinnie and Balthazar were silent as they strode down the next hallway, a flashlight—not a gadget, a simple flashlight—guiding their path.  When they reached the door which, according to recollection, led to Milo Murphy’s classroom, they found it boarded up.  By now accustomed to Milo’s condition, they shrugged and left in search of the sixth-grade lab.

Finally, Balthazar blurted out, “So you and Agent Chesapeake…”

“Yeah?”

“You were more than partners?”  Balthazar quickened his pace.

“Ancient history!”  Vinnie rubbed his right arm with his left.  “No really, it’s ancient history.  We… we were in Babylon when we hooked up, all right?”

Despite having suspected it since first seeing her, Balthazar felt his blood run cold at this confirmation.  “She’s… she’s very pretty.”  It was the first thing he could think to say.

“Yeah, we had fun.  But look, I’m not helping her here because I’m trying to get in her pants or anything, all right?  I really do owe her one.”  Vinnie found the door to the sixth-grade science room and unlocked it with a tool that had to have come from Chesapeake, although Balthazar couldn’t remember when she had given it to him.

Inside they found the typical contents of the average junior high lab—sinks, beakers, Bunsen burners, a gerbil cage.  Figuring it would be the easiest means of ensuring the lab’s uselessness, Balthazar set to work cutting the hose lines for each burner, while Vinnie carefully poured the contents of every reagent he could find into a separate neutralizing bag.

“We weren’t actually supposed to stop the Mississippi purchase, all right?” Vinnie said suddenly.  “That’s why you don’t know anything about it.  An event of that magnitude, if they commissioned it at all, which they _didn’t_ , you bet they wouldn’t send someone at my level.  Especially not someone at my level when I first graduated from the Academy.”

“That was your first mission?”

“Mission, yes.  Assignment, no.  I was paired with her to make sure Grover Cleveland’s parents got together.  Which, obviously, we did.  It was supposed to be an easy task so she could show me the ropes.  It took us all of half an hour to complete.  But we had the time bike, and even though we weren’t authorized to go back that far, she had a few tricks up her sleeve so none of the higher-ups would ever know.  When I mentioned that stopping the Mississippi Purchase was why I wanted to be a time traveler in the first place, she made that detour right then and there.”  Vinnie moved on to clogging up the sinks with some kind of resin.

“But what was so important about preventing the Mississippi Purchase?  Isn’t the Louisiana Purchase more or less the same thing?”

Vinnie took a whole shelf of graduated cylinders and knocked them to the floor.  If the school had competent security, Balthazar realized, they surely would have been arrested for vandalism by now.  “Believe me.  It isn’t,” Vinnie said through gritted teeth.  “Sixth-grade laboratory has been rendered unusable,” he said into his headset.

Balthazar took a broom and dustpan and quickly swept up as much of the broken glass as he could before joining Vinnie in the hallway.

“And what about the seventh-grade facility?” came Agent Chesapeake’s voice through the headset.

“Unusable as soon as we reached it,” Vinnie told her.

“Are you positive?” she asked, slightly panicked.  “Because I just checked in with Block as to our progress, and apparently the Famine still happened.”

“We must have missed something!” Balthazar said, not bothering to push the button on his speaker.

“Come meet us in front of the seventh-grade lab.  We’ll check it again,” Vinnie told Chesapeake.

“Copy.”

“Do you suppose that the Murphy boy is nearby?” asked Balthazar as Vinnie broke into a run.

“Doubt it.  It’s still pretty early to be at school.  Besides, if he was, he’d probably mess up whoever’s trying to invent this Nyne Dust and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“This is very true,” Balthazar conceded as they reached the room at the same time as Chesapeake.

It was no longer boarded up.

And the lights were on.

Chesapeake motioned for Balthazar and Vinnie to stay back as she reached into her backpack and withdrew a ray gun.

“Watch it, Chessie, that could be a kid in there,” Vinnie warned.

“It’s a last resort, promise.  And I’ve got a revival kit with me.”

With that, she charged into the room, the men after her, and found…

…a boy with black hair and glasses, about Milo’s age, frantically digging through a drawer in search of who knew what.

“Told ya,” Vinnie said in a sing-song voice, as Chesapeake playfully fake-punched him.

The boy turned around and froze for a second, then laughed.  “You’re not cops,” he said.  “I bet that’s not even a real gun!”

Chesapeake aimed the weapon at a nearby burner and fired three shots.  The first did nothing, the second melted the metal a little, and the third disintegrated the burner entirely.

“Hey, I was gonna use that!” the boy whined.  “Now I have to dig out another.  And anyway, what are you three doing vandalizing school property?”

“We’re not the ones who kicked down the boards to get in here,” Vinnie pointed out.

“My boy, what brings you to school so early in the morning anyway?” Balthazar asked.

He shrugged.  “I wanted to use the lab.  That _Milo Murphy_ thinks he’s so great with his egg-dropping skills and his sentient plasma and his alien abductions, and Melissa Chase eats it up with a spoon!  But fine, if it’s science she’s into, I’ll just have to invent something better to get her attention.  Behold, the bug spray of the future!”  He gestured to the table, where some concoction sat in a beaker.

Chesapeake, who was now wearing the composition goggles from before, lunged for the beaker.  “I have to confiscate this!” she said as she snatched it away.

“That’s my work!” the boy said indignantly.  “You have no right to take it!”

“Trust me, kid, it’s for the greater good,” Chesapeake told him as she ran outside.

“This always happens!”  He kicked the table in frustration.  “I always come up with something cool, and the second Milo Murphy _breathes_ , everyone can’t get enough of it!  I bet he’s out in the hall or something.”

“Nope.  Not this time.  But we do know this Milo Murphy,” said Vinnie.  “He seems like a nice kid.”

“I’m nice!” the boy insisted.  “And smart, and most importantly, I’m _safe_!  Why can’t Melissa see that?”

“Melissa was the redhead who was with him, right?” Vinnie asked Balthazar, who nodded.  “She seemed nice too.  Are you sure you’re giving her enough credit?”

The boy looked down and said nothing.

“See, I wasn’t getting vibes that she was sweet on the kid anyway, did you?”

“I did not.”  Although admittedly, Balthazar hadn’t really paid the slightest bit of attention to which of the children liked which of the others, and childhood crushes could be so fleeting.

“Yeah, but it’s only a matter of time,” the boy lamented.  “Melissa Chase and Milo Murphy are always together, and they have been for years.  And for years, I’ve wished she would pay attention to me for once.  That’s why I wanted to impress her.”

“Well did it ever occur to you _why_ Melissa might spend so much time in Milo’s company?” Balthazar asked, pulling up a stool and sitting down so as to be at eye level with the boy.

“Because she’s into him!”

“That may very well be true.  Or then again, it might not be.  But you seem nearly as intent on separating her from Milo as you are on winning her heart.  And trust me, my child, that will not end well.”  Balthazar sighed.  “Even if you succeed.  Those years you mentioned, of the two being together?  Those can never be undone.  Those years of studying together or watching movies or… riding the same motorcycle… they mean something to her.  And no matter how much you pine for her, you’ll never really love her if that depends on their love never existing.  Trust me.”  He stood up.  “I may be a time traveler, but love of any sort is immutable, unbearable though it may be.”

The boy made a fist, then unclenched it.  Then he swept his arm over the table and knocked all of the ingredients he’d used to the floor.  “Fine,” he said.  “The world didn’t need another kind of bug spray anyway.”

He left.

Agent Chesapeake walked back in, clapping her hands together as though to remove the last bit of dust.  “Welp, that’s taken care of!  The original dose of Nyne Dust has been denatured.  What say we head out for breakfast before I have to go?”

Vinnie looked nervously between Chesapeake and Balthazar.  Balthazar smiled.

“That sounds delightful,” he replied, and Vinnie breathed a sigh of relief.

They found a diner not far from the school, and while they were waiting for their food, Chesapeake slipped away for the ladies’ room.  “Behave yourselves while I’m gone,” she said, squeezing Vinnie’s cheek as she got up from the table.

As soon as she was gone, Vinnie rounded on Balthazar.  “So.  What you said to the kid in there, about loving someone with a history with someone else…”

“I admit it,” Balthazar said.  “I’ve been jealous of Chesapeake.  She’s attractive, and talented, and successful, and I can see why you and she have had what you had.  I can even see why you might want to consider getting back together.  It’s… it’s not as though I have any sort of claim on you.”

“But you wish you did?”  Vinnie took a sip of the coffee the waiter had just brought.

Balthazar flicked the straw in his glass of cranberry juice.  “It’s selfish, but yes.”

Vinnie slid around to the other side of the table so he was sitting right next to Balthazar.  He took his hand and squeezed it.  “It’s not selfish.  I’ve… I’ve thought the same.  I’d probably feel the same way if we ran into an old colleague of yours and I knew you’d been… well, you know.”

“But you still love her.”

“I… I do,” Vinnie confessed.  “But it’s not like that!  I care about her a lot, but Chesapeake and I are never going to be a thing.  We never really were.”

Balthazar was confused.  “You said… in Babylon…”

“Yeah, and a few other places.  It was fun and all, but we had to call it off.  Balthy, she’s aro.”

“Aro?”

“Aromantic.  She loved me, but she never was _in_ love with me.  She couldn’t be.  Nothing wrong with it, or her, just the way she’s wired.  Our friendship and the sex were two completely different things.  As much as I was enjoying myself, I knew in the long run I needed the romance part.  I needed to be in love.  And she understood.”  He added a sugar packet to his drink.  “Besides, like I told you, she was only my partner long enough to train me.  She got reassigned after like our third mission.”

Balthazar frowned.  “But if she wasn’t interested in you that way, for what reason did she see fit to act so flirtatious before?”

Vinnie blushed and smiled at the same time.  “Well, part of it’s just her personality,” he began, “but I think most of it was because she wanted to hook us up.”

Balthazar sputtered.  “Hook ‘us’ up?  As in you and me?”

“Yeah, basically.”

“Why?”

“Well… she’s very observant.”  Vinnie drank about half an inch of coffee off the top, then replaced it with creamer.  “Also because the last time I saw her, I told her about you.  That my new partner was kind of stuffy and didn’t know how to have fun, but still pretty hot and determined when he set his mind to something.  I always liked that kind of passion.  Also I have a thing for mustaches.  Totally my type.”

“Oh.  Well that’s… that’s quite flattering,” Balthazar said just as Chesapeake came back from the restroom, smirking at the sight of the men holding hands.

Their food arrived, and the ensuing conversation was perfectly pleasant.  Balthazar realized quickly how pointed a lot of Chesapeake’s questions addressed to him were—about his hobbies, his social life, his preferences in a partner—and yet how she always managed to toe the line between “personal” and “nosy.”  She also tended to talk about Vinnie in a positive light, highlighting his sense of humor and quick thinking.  Balthazar couldn’t believe just how severely he had misjudged her motives before—she wasn’t trying to steal Vinnie.  She was trying to act as his wingman.

And Balthazar couldn’t deny that she was succeeding.

After breakfast and a quick ride back to the apartment, Chesapeake threw her arms around Vinnie and kissed his forehead.  “I gotta go back now,” she told him, “but don’t be a stranger, now, you hear?”

“I hear!” Vinnie told her as she likewise hugged Balthazar and pecked his cheek.

The sun was rising, but since they had completed their mission and, according to Vinnie, Chesapeake would probably take her sweet time in handing her report back in to Mr. Block, it was a safe bet that they had the rest of the day to themselves.

“We could just stay in for once, you know?  Go back to bed, order a pizza, what have you,” Vinnie suggested, and Balthazar agreed that this option did sound very inviting.  The excitement of the morning was wearing on him, and he would have liked to sleep for a few more hours.

Nevertheless, there was still a matter of business that remained.

“Vinnie,” he said softly after closing the door to their bedroom, “I… I do care about you.  A lot.”

“I know.”

“Then… then can I ask you something?”  Balthazar clasped his hands together.  He knew this conversation wouldn’t be easy, but if he and Vinnie were ever going to be even as close as Vinnie had been to Chesapeake, let alone have anything more, then it needed to happen sooner or later.

Vinnie took off his track suit and tossed it into the hamper, but Balthazar wasn’t fooled.  He knew Vinnie was just going to fish it out again and wear it the next day.  “Sure,” Vinnie told him, sitting down on his bed.

Balthazar sat next to him.  “What, exactly, made stopping the Mississippi Purchase so important to you?  Important enough that Chesapeake would break the rules for you, and that you would feel such a sense of indebtedness to her?”

Vinnie swallowed and looked away.

“It’s not that I wish to pry,” Balthazar clarified.  “It’s just that well, you’re always so laissez-faire about virtually every other matter.  If it’s serious enough that it would weigh on you so, I’d like to at least know what you’re feeling.”

Vinnie sighed.  “That’s fair.  It’s just… it has to do with some stuff in my own life, all right?  Stuff that I like to pretend didn’t happen, now that it, well, _didn’t_ happen.”

“How do you mean?”

Vinnie flopped backwards and stared at the ceiling.  “I’m… I’m not from this time.  This time _line_ , I mean.”

Balthazar took off his hat and tossed it over to his own bed.  “I don’t suppose any of us are, really,” he mused.

Vinnie shook his head.  “But you’re close enough.  Me?  My world was pretty different before I joined up.  When I said the Louisiana Purchase and the Mississippi Purchase were two very different things, I meant it.  The Louisiana Purchase was bad enough, with the violence that ensued, especially for my people.”

“You’re… you’re Native?” Balthazar deduced.

Vinnie nodded.  “Part.  But the Mississippi Purchase got even worse, was even bloodier.  There was Andrew Jackson’s invasion of West Hispania—”

“Where?”

“Yeah, that country doesn’t exist in your timeline.  Anyway, you had the Prairie Wars, the displacement of former slaves after the Civil War… it was all a mess and it didn’t even stop with the 1800s.  No, long story short, when the Great Depression rolled around, that whole dust-bowl thing was ten times worse.  They think the Famine of 2025 was supposed to be bad, but trust me, this was a whole ’nother can of worms.  And even that was nothing compared to how our World War II played out.”  Vinnie sat up and drew his knees to his chest.  “Think over two decades’ worth of fighting.  With more nukes, and… and more death.  As in about half the world.”

“Half of the _world_?”

“Yeah.  Whole countries completely wiped out.  And a lot more fighting on the U.S. home front.  And Reconstruction was still going on when I was born… in Death Valley, 1984.”

Balthazar gasped.  “But that’s… that’s well over a century before the Bureau even existed!  Or was it different in your time?”

“No, it wasn’t different,” Vinnie answered.  “But that’s not the point.  My ancestors, my family… every time a new tragedy struck, it got worse for us.  My folks were deported to the state you know as Nevada after the war with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.  They did that with a lot of families deemed too “Un-American.”  There was nothing there because, well, it was the desert.  We grew up hungry, my siblings and I.  And when the polio epidemics struck—”

“Polio?  But the vaccine was developed… in the 1950s…”  Balthazar felt himself go pale.  “When, in your timeline, the war was still waging.  So the researchers were probably doing something else.”

Vinnie took off his sunglasses and dropped them carelessly to the floor.  Balthazar noticed a tear in the corner of his eye, which he promptly wiped away.  “Yeah.  So in 1998 there was nothing we could do when kids started dropping.  My older sister Lynette, my younger brother Marvin.  Both dead.  My younger sister Angela was only seven years old and paralyzed from the neck down.  It hurt to watch her suffer.  Every day I wished I could go back in time and change something… anything.  And then on December 31, 1999, I got my chance.”

“You met a time traveler.”

Vinnie swallowed.  “I’m not naming names.  Not because I don’t trust you, but because I made a promise not to.  They knew taking me back with them and letting me stay in the future could get them in serious trouble.  But when I told them my story, and when they realized how pretty much every crappy thing about my childhood could be traced back to the Mississippi Purchase, they helped me wiggle my way into the Academy.  So that’s… that’s it.  That’s my story.  I… I never thought I’d feel safe telling anyone besides Chessie.”

Balthazar took Vinnie’s hands in his own.  “I’m… I’m terribly sorry,” he whispered.  “You’ve been through so much, and here I sit complaining at every inconvenience.  You’re always just so grateful to be alive, and now I know why.  I… thank you for telling me.”

Vinnie squeezed Balthazar and shed a few more tears.  “I’ll be fine in a few hours,” he promised.  “I mean, it’s over, really and truly.  It never even happened.  I still visit my parents when I can, and my siblings are all still alive and well.”  He pulled away, eyes still glistening.  “It’ll be all right.  I just need to sleep it off.”

“Oh.”  Balthazar stood up.  “Do you need your space?”

Vinnie paused.  “Actually… I’d kind of like some company.”  He pulled back the covers, slid under, and gestured for Balthazar to join him.

Balthazar complied.  He took Vinnie in his arms and held him, just held him.  It was so much to take in, but it must have been even more to _hold_ in.  He kissed the top of Vinnie’s forehead.  “If you ever need to talk about it again, I’m right here,” he said as they got situated under the blanket.

Vinnie snuggled extra close.


End file.
